What Autistic Patients Look At, and What That Means

A prominent clinical manifestation of autism is the patient's lack of eye contact, and a DSM-IV diagnostic criterion for autism is deviant socialization. In neuroimaging studies, the brain areas that are activated in nonautistic persons when they look at objects are the same areas that are activated when autistic individuals look at faces. In this study, 15 high-IQ participants with autism (mean age, 15) and 15 IQ- and age-matched normal controls viewed images from the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, which was selected for its high emotional content; investigators simultaneously used computerized equipment attached to the bill of a hat to measure participants' visual fixation on eyes, mouths, bodies, or objects in the movie. Autistic…